One of the built-in apps that received several interesting improvements in OS X Lion is QuickTime Player, Apple’s default video and music player based on the QuickTime framework that’s capable of handling a variety of audio, video, and picture codecs. Seemingly unchanged from version 10 of QuickTime Player that shipped with Mac OS X Snow Leopard, the new QuickTime Player 10.1 contains a number of changes under the hood, new sharing features, as well as screen recording enhancements built specifically for OS X Lion. Read more
Apple Posts New iPad 2 Commercial: “We’ll Always”
We’ll never stop sharing our memories. Or getting lost in a good book. We’ll always cook dinner, and cheer for our favorite team. We’ll still go to meetings, make home movies, and learn new things. But how do all this, we’ll never be the same.
Apple posted a new iPad 2 commercial on its website and YouTube channel, once again highlighting how the device is changing the way people do things in their lives. With the “We’ll always” ad, Apple wants to show how the iPad has changed, and perhaps improved, the most basic tasks like cooking dinner or editing a quick video in iMovie. Just like other commercials like “Now” and “If You Asked”, Apple’s focus is on apps – the software – rather than technical specifications and hardware features. In this latest video, the iPad is seen organizing photos in the native Photos app, streaming a baseball match and flipping pages of an iBook – among other things. The built-in iOS and the apps – not the screen or the thin form factor – are the real stars in Apple’s iPad commercials.
Apple’s previous iPad 2 commercials were called “We Believe”, “If You Asked” and “Now”. Check out the new video below. [YouTube via 9to5mac]
Read more
OS X Lion 10.7.2 Shows Up On Dev Center
As first noted by BGR, a link to download OS X Lion version 10.7.2 has briefly appeared in the iCloud section of the Developer Center, which is unaccessible at the moment of writing this. However, a screen taken by BGR confirms that Apple – it’s not clear whether mistakenly or not – inserted a link to download a new developer seed of Lion, which was publicly released earlier this week on the Mac App Store.
According to Apple, this new version of Lion “is being provided solely for testing iCloud”, which has received an update to beta 5 today as a standalone control panel to install on OS X. iCloud is due this Fall as announced by Apple at WWDC in June. It is unclear whether this build of Lion for iCloud testing will be released alongside iCloud later this year, but considering Lion has yet to see a maintenance update to version 10.7.1, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see 10.7.2 scheduled for launch when iCloud is ready, too.
Since the launch of new hardware last Wednesday, it was noted the new MacBook Airs carried a different OS X Lion build number, version 11A2063.
Apple Releases iOS 5 Beta 4
Apple just seeded iOS 5 beta 4 to developers. The new build, carrying number 9A5274d, is available now in the Dev Center. iOS 5 beta 3 was seeded to developers on July 11, introducing a series of tweaks to Location Services and several optimizations to the underlying code of the OS, which resulted much snappier and more responsive than previous betas. However, some developers reported that bugs with Notification Center found in iOS 5 beta 1 were still not fixed in beta 3. iOS 5 will ship in the fall, as announced by Apple at WWDC.
We’ll update this story with more information and details as they become available. Read more
An Overview of Automator Improvements In Lion
Automator, the suite of automation tools for OS X that can create user workflows, services or apps, has received a series of interesting improvements in Lion, some of them useful additions that will likely eliminate the need for certain kinds of third-party software for many users. In spite of Lion being described as a “user-friendly” OS thanks to the implementation of gestures or full-screen apps, as we’ve seen in our review and other articles following the Mac App Store launch it’s clear there’s still much room for tweaking and “taking control” of the OS when you want to get the most out of it. Take the Option key for example: Option has been capable of reversing certain behaviors in Mac apps for quite some time, but in Lion it gets a whole new usage as it can reverse the entire Resume system, show the Library in the Finder’s menubar, or change the Finder’s “Arrange By” feature to “Sort By”. And that’s just the Option key. Personally, I disagree on the assumption that Apple is “dumbing down” the operating system only by introducing functionalities that make interacting with a computer easier. The way I see it, Lion is the most powerful and feature-rich version of OS X to date (and several developers, from a technical standpoint, agree with this) and, actually, the gestures themselves can appease any power user when correctly mastered. Lion may look simpler on the surface (and to an extent, I can see why the addition of the Launchpad doesn’t help as far as this argument goes), but it’s a very powerful entry in the OS X family once you take a peek under the hood. Read more
Mono, Beautiful Growl Theme, Updated for Lion
Mono by Christopher Lobay is a beautiful theme for Growl, the popular notification system for OS X, that I’ve been using on my MacBook Pro and iMac since it was first released last year. Of all the Growl themes I’ve used, Mono was the one that provided a good compromise of gorgeous interface and usability – I like my Growl themes to be informative, beautiful to look at, unobtrusive and definitely not “sticky” on screen. I typically set my Growl preferences to display a notification for 1.5 seconds, which plays very well with Mono’s animation that makes alerts slide into your Mac’s screen from the side.
Mono has been updated to version 2.0, and while this update doesn’t bring any major visual change from Mono 1.0, it does add full Lion compatibility. Indeed I tried to configure Mono with Growl on Lion last week, but couldn’t get it to work – that was particularly unfortunate for me as my favorite theme couldn’t be tested with GrowlMail, which has been updated to version 1.3 to, again, work with Lion and the new Apple Mail. With Mono 2.0, everything works: notifications show up correctly on Lion, as do new messages from Mail. As a side note, I noticed I had to manually restart the Growl process and all associated apps to get notifications to work on OS X Lion.
Meanwhile, the Growl developers are busy building a new Mac App Store version that won’t be free, and it’s supposed to come out soon with several enhancements and new features. While waiting for the all-new Growl, you can download Mono 2.0 here.
Verizon Activates 2.3 Million iPhone 4s In Q2
As noted by ZDNet, Verizon reported its second quarter earnings today, delivering strong results and reporting revenue of $27.53 billion. The company added 1.3 million postpaid customers, with data revenues up 22.2 percent year-over-year and 189,000 FiOS Internet and 184,000 FiOS TV net additions. As with the iPhone, the earnings reveal Verizon activated 2.3 million iPhone 4 units in the second quarter, a 100,000 units increase from the 2.2 million iPhone 4s they activated in the previous quarter after roughly two months of availability in the US since the February 10 launch.
Verizon’s relatively flat growth rate with activated iPhone units doesn’t surprise when compared to AT&T’s similar trend - AT&T activated 3.6 million iPhones in the last two quarters. The difference, however, is that Verizon only has access to the CDMA iPhone 4, both in black and white, whereas AT&T sells both the black/white iPhone 4 and the older iPhone 3GS model, which is still on sale and considered a good entry option for new iPhone users that don’t want to spend a ful $200 on an iPhone 4 with a two-year contract. AT&T’s offer is diversified, Verizon Wireless doesn’t have a cheaper iPhone 3GS to sell to its customers.
Moreover, with increasing rumors of a new iPhone coming out in September (allegedly confirmed by Apple’s “product transition for the September quarter” revealed at the Q3 earnings call), it’s likely customers are holding off new purchases (and thus, contracts) as they wait for a new device to become available in the Fall. The iPhone 5 has been rumored to have worldphone capabilities with an integrated GSM/CDMA chip, and most recent speculation has also claimed Apple could be considering a new, cheaper iPhone to sell off contract at less than $200 to attract the masses of the pre-paid market.
[ZDNet - PRNewswire]
Adobe Clarifies: Flash Hardware Video Acceleration Not Disabled in Lion→
Adobe Clarifies: Flash Hardware Video Acceleration Not Disabled in Lion
Following the release of OS X Lion yesterday, a number of users immediately noticed that some of Adobe’s desktop tools, including Flash Player, had a series of compatibility issues with Apple’s new OS. Adobe started acknowledging these issues with a Known Issues official page, and TUAW noted most of Adobe’s product line was affected by the upgrade. Among the mentioned issues, Adobe stated ”higher CPU activity when playing a YouTube video” with Flash Player was ”possibly related to disabled hardware acceleration” on Lion. Several blogs and tech publications implied Apple had done some changes to Lion’s final build to “kill” Flash Player for OS X.
With an update and a blog post, Adobe has now clarified that video hardware acceleration is not disabled in Lion.
The final release of Mac OS X Lion (10.7) provides the same support for Flash hardware video acceleration as Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6). The previous “Known Issue” described in a tech note suggesting that video hardware acceleration was disabled in Lion was incorrect and based on tests with a pre-release version of Mac OS X Lion that related to only one particular Mac GPU configuration. We continue to work closely with Apple to provide Flash Player users with a high quality experience on Mac computers.
From the Known Issues page:
Flash Player may cause higher CPU activity when playing a YouTube video. Possibly related to disabled hardware acceleration.
But then there’s an update below the first note:
UPDATE: The final release of Mac OS X Lion (10.7) provides the same support for Flash hardware video acceleration as Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6). The previous “Known Issue” suggesting that video hardware acceleration was disabled in Lion was incorrect and based on tests with a pre-release version of Mac OS X Lion that related to only one particular Mac GPU configuration. We continue to work closely with Apple to provide Flash Player users with a high quality experience on Mac computers.
Flash Player can be downloaded here, but the webpage still doesn’t include OS X 10.7 as supported OS.
Lodsys Sues Rovio Over Angry Birds for iOS and Android, More Developers
As noted by FOSS Patents, Lodsys, the company that started suing app developers over alleged patent infringement for in-app purchases and upgrade buttons back in May, has amended its complaint including more companies allegedly infringing on their patents, like Rovio. Lodsys has left out Vietnamese company Wulven Games from the suit, but has now included other bigger names like the makers of Angry Birds, EA, Atari, Square Enix, and Take-Two Interactive. In total, Lodsys is now suing 37 defendants – smaller independent companies like The Iconfactory were first sent notices by Lodsys in May.
Lodsys is still not impressed by Apple’s assertion that its own license to Lodsys’s patents extends to its app developers. I also pointed out that Apple’s “exhaustion” theory is not necessarily accurate. Also, Lodsys may be able to capitalize on contractual commitments that might preclude Apple and Google from challenging Lodsys’s patents and the related infringement allegations.
With today’s amended complaint, Lodsys is currently suing a total of 37 defendants, and there may be more to come.
In the first weeks of June, Apple filed a motion to intervene in the proceedings between Lodsys and app developers hit by the patent infringement claims – which Apple claimed have no basis as Apple is “indisputably licensed” to the patents, and the app makers are protected by the development agreement with Apple. Florian Mueller at FOSS Patents doesn’t seem to share a similar view, and we recommend you check out all the updates and timeline of events over at his blog.